The group is chaired by Gary Markwell, a Conservative local councillor in Sussex. The Activate website initially profiled Tories in key roles in the organisation, including an all-male national committee.

But on Tuesday afternoon the “people” page disappeared from the site. Activate did not respond to the Star’s request for comment on this matter.

The foundation of the group follows calls from senior Tories for the governing party to emulate Momentum, a grassroots pressure group set up out of Jeremy Corbyn’s successful Labour leadership campaign.

Yesterday a Conservative spokesman insisted that Activate had no formal links to the party.

The group has been lampooned for its amateurish use of graphics and social media. Its first official tweet showed Mr Corbyn in front of Labour slogans accompanied with a shot of Star Wars character Admiral Ackbar, captioned “IT’S A TRAP.”

And online critics were puzzled by the seemingly random presence of a square-root symbol in the organisation’s logo.

A Momentum source said: “We’re flattered that Tory activists have been inspired by the success of Momentum in setting up Activate, but they’ve made some rookie errors early on.

“If they had really learnt lessons from our viral social media content, they would know they don’t have to use the hashtags #meme and #retweet with every graphic they share.

“And if they are as committed to a ‘modern’ Conservative Party as they say, maybe they shouldn’t have picked an all-male national committee. At this rate we wouldn’t be surprised if Activate deactivates in the near future.”

IT IS easy to mock the embarrassing efforts of Activate, the “independent national grassroots campaigning organisation” aiming to win back the nation’s youth for the Conservatives.

Its initial tweet, a meme of a Star Wars character from 1983’s Return of the Jedi warning the young not to trust Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, has been howled down for feeling the need to include #meme and #retweet — an admission, surely, that its activists might not know why they were recycling pictures of fictional aliens from the Thatcher era or what to do with them.

What can the left make of this, other than what we already knew — that the world Young Conservatives inhabit is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?

The Tories want some of that action, and are clearly worried by their abysmal polling ratings among young people.

Founding their own Momentum shows at least some Tories recognise that the soundbite and spin-based politics of the Blair years, where a campaign consisted of carefully calibrated messages designed to win over an increasingly imaginary “Middle England,” is over.

Activate won’t work. As the author Alex Nunns told this newspaper in June, you can’t recreate Labour’s mass mobilisation without large numbers of activists, and Labour is the only mass membership party in Britain today.

But if Activate is doomed to failure, the Conservative Party is not. It has beaten back the tide of history often enough before now. It is the most electorally successful party in British history, and it has not managed that without the ability to appeal to working-class voters.